Ex-Meta Platforms Employees' Sui Blasts Off: Is This The End For Aptos, Other DeFi Titans?

With a $2 billion valuation, the highly anticipated Layer 1 blockchain Sui SUI/USD debuted its mainnet on Wednesday.

Sui will go up against Facebook spinoff Aptos APT/USD and other significant decentralized financial (DeFi) companies.

The token's price is currently $1.26, up significantly from $0.03 during the pre-sale and $0.10 during the public sale. The market capitalization according to CoinGecko is $667 million.

More than 200 projects are listed in the blockchain that former Meta Platforms Inc. META employees founded. There are another 100 projects vying to use the platform, too.

Despite the Sui team's claims of quick transaction times, the blockchain's explorer data on Wednesday revealed an average speed of about four transactions per second, 4 tps, compared to Aptos, which has a speed of 9 tps.

Sui has seen certain difficulties with decentralization and uncertainty surrounds the allocation of token owners.

With almost 2,100 nodes running in 43 countries, the majority are located in Germany and the U.S., with a small number of nodes also operating in Asia and Eastern Europe.

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The blockchain's primary developer, Mysten Labs, raised $300 million last year to assist the growth of the network's basic infrastructure and hasten the uptake of the Sui ecosystem.

Success with its pre-launch venture capital funding has led to comparisons to Aptos, another relatively new blockchain with sizable venture capital backing. 

But recently, Sui's tokenomics have drawn criticism.

Sui disappointed some members of the community when it announced in April that it would not conduct an airdrop. Instead, the community was given access to the platform's native token, SUI SUI/USD, which is utilized for gas and governance, at $0.03 per token during an early offer on three exchanges: OKX, KuCoin and ByBit.

A token sale later had a limit of 10,000 tokens per user and a price of $0.10 per token.

Through its Launchpad bootstrapping portal, Binance supported SUI for holders of BNB BNB/USD and TUSD TUSD/USD earlier this week.

The early sale program was not available to users in the U.S.

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